02 June 23
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As a collective of people who post bail for strangers, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is one of nearly a hundred organized bail funds around the country. These community bail funds share a sense that the state should not be subjecting people to the violence of jail simply because they cannot pay their bail. More essentially, bail funds understand that one powerful way to push back against the injustice of pretrial detention is to join together in the act of paying bail for strangers.
In the case of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, much of their focus in the past year has been on providing this collective support to activists in their local movement to stop “Cop City,” shorthand for the Atlanta Police Foundation’s plan to raze 85 acres of the Weelaunee Forest and, in its place, build a $90 million police training complex that includes a small model city in which to practice police tactics. The Cop City project would, in turn, be funded by at least $30 million in Atlanta’s public funds, and possibly as much as $51 million in public money. For more than two years, the Stop Cop City movement has pushed back against this proposal, through protest actions and tactics ranging from occupation of the forest to mass testimony at city council hearings on the proposal. In return, local and state police have continuously surveilled and criminalized these activities, beginning with the arrests of protesters in September 2021. The movement lost its first member to state violence when, in January 2023, Georgia State Patrol killed a 26-year-old nonbinary movement activist who was known as Tortuguita, and who was shot at least 57 times by patrol officers while they sat cross-legged in the forest. According to the police, Tortuguita fired first and hit a state trooper, but the available evidence—including the autopsy report, body camera footage, and a lack of gunpowder residue on Tortuguita’s body—point to the state trooper being hit by a fellow officer and Tortuguita’s hands being up in the air when they were gunned down in cold blood.
The three Solidarity Fund organizers arrested this week—Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson—have been initially charged with the felony crimes of charity fraud and money laundering. Georgia officials are not hiding the underlying theory of these prosecutions: that to be part of a group supporting protesters is, itself, a crime. State prosecutors said as much during the bail hearings of dozens of activists who were charged earlier this year with state domestic terrorism charges—their “terrorism” being the alleged destruction of property or trespassing while engaged in protest. During these prior bail hearings, the state prosecutors made arguments that, were it not for the accompanying criminalization, might verge on comical: They used as evidence against the activists at their bail hearings the fact that some of those arrested had written on their arms the phone number of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in case bail was set against them. The activists were correct in their fear that the police might arrest protesters and attempt to hold them in cages because they could not afford bail. And for that prescience, they were labeled as terrorists. The state’s intention to criminalize dissent could not have been clearer, to both the prosecutors and those they were prosecuting.
This is a longstanding tactic of the repression of dissent: to criminalize the collective care of activists, including through the payment of money bail. In the 1950s, for example, the federal government targeted a bail fund run by the Civil Rights Congress that supported people charged in politically motivated prosecutions, especially those accused of communism under the second Red Scare. The Congress’ president, writer Dashiell Hammett, served five months in a federal prison because he would not reveal the names of the funders of the bail fund. More recently, politicians across the political spectrum have surveilled and attacked community bail funds in the wake of the 2020 uprisings against police violence, whether it was the repeated far-right attacks on the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the 2020 and 2022 national elections, or the 2020 investigation of the Massachusetts Bail Fund by then-Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is now the governor. (Healey’s investigation was later quietly closed without any findings of wrongdoing.) In each instance, government officials took a routine procedure—the posting of bail—and turned it into alleged criminal conduct because of the collective, and therefore political, nature of the actions.
This week’s prosecutions of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers, however, have taken this form of state political repression to a new level. In what is a first in recent memory, prosecutors are openly charging people with felonies simply for being organizers within a bail collective that uses legally established procedures to post bail for movement allies. The state is criminalizing collective care itself. And it is doing so at a time when forms of collective support are becoming increasingly essential, whether it is efforts to support people seeking abortions, to provide health care to trans youth across state lines, to leave out water for people crossing through the desert, or to house, clothe, and feed migrants in crisis. As each of these forms of collective care face repression and accompanying criminalization, we should be frightened by the ways in which the state so quickly transforms a group of people taking care of someone else into a criminal act. As state officials in Georgia are demonstrating, this does not always require the passage of a new criminal law—although states are doing that, too.
Part of what makes this state repression so troubling is that it is so explicit: If you take care of each other, we will come for you. By criminalizing the support structures of social movements, government officials are acknowledging how threatening it is when people come together to live out understandings of public safety and collective freedom that clash with the government’s stated priorities. The Stop Cop City movement has certainly done this, using festive concerts in a forest to draw broader connections between the destruction of natural resources and the funding of police violence. The criminalization of this mutual joy is frightening, but it also points toward the power of collective care and solidarity, a power that we all can and should seek to play a part in, wherever we live.
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